skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He merged a pull request from someone he probably didn't know (new to node.js, different country). Without looking at the rest of the file it looks OK to me. That's probably what happened - he didn't get all of the program's relevant structure in his mind when he read the code.

https://github.com/visionmedia/n/pull/85/files#r1781158
My first computer was a Powerbook 100 in 1992. Apple had authorized a firesale on them, because they couldn't move them. I paid $700 for the base model with 2MB of RAM, a 20MB hard drive, and a SCSI external floppy drive.

It was shortly thereafter that I bought my first computer book, a Hypercard book by Danny Goodman.
Maybe it's time for wider support for more advanced image compression formats (JPEG200, WebP, JPEGXR).
No, just that one instance doesn't make a trend.
The Only Game Talibans Let You Play In Afghanistan
He states straight out in his FAQ that he supports Obama.

"What is your political affiliation? My state has non-partisan registration, so I am not registered as anything. I vote for Democratic candidates the majority of the time (though by no means always). This year, I have been a supporter of Barack Obama."

And the next question -

"Are your results biased toward your preferred candidates? I hope not, but that is for you to decide. I have tried to disclose as much about my methodology as possible."
Sure it's Yogi? It's also attributed to Samuel Goldwyn and Mark Twain. (I doubt the Twain association).
If you want to try it just buy some cinder blocks from lowes / home depot. They're about $2 each and 4 of them will get your desk up pretty high. I'm 6'2" with a regular height adjustable work desk (many office ones are). For $16 I tried it out for a month. Have a Geek Desk on order. Still need a floor / mat solution for my office.
When in elementary school I would use a similar technique to get a command line: Word Perfect for DOS could launch command.com.
That's from 2008, right? FiveThirtyEight.com isn't his site anymore.
I'm no lawyer but logically speaking the antitrust allegations against Google don't seem like they'll amount to much, firstly the notion of having the government dictate what goes in your app/website doesn't sound right nor legal. And there is the blatantly self serving demands from competitor alleging consumer harm; they either want to be guaranteed prominent placement among Google’s results or they want Google to only feature links, and only links to the end of time, meaning they don't want them to innovate and would like them to offer an inferior product, and given that people have had a taste of Siri for example, the notion that search engines must only serve links has dissipated.

There is also the small detail of Google being free, and has virtually no-lockin and anything they offer has an equivalent offered by somebody else. And last time I checked they didn't lack in competitors, so why is the government essentially also competing against Google. The whole thing seems like a result of a major political malfunction.
Actually he came from the fantastic World of poker :)

He gravitated to Sabermetrics from there.
Which is slightly scary security wise. Over the large number of libs, programs, etc people often pull half-blind if the code looks "mostly ok and does what it says"

Except it can do also a lot of other bad things, and its too much to review. So in the end you trust the tree owner, and he blindly trust a zillion people.

I actually have zero good solution to this, but it'll be interesting when it is used for a large attack.
Weddingrepublic.com
This is so wrong.

1) He didn't sharpen the small images.

2) He only displayed one type of image - very bright with no shadow detail.

This theory breaks completely if you actually compare apples to apples. Like these two, both 80KB generated from a high quality image:

http://i.imgur.com/E3gaB.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/UrDEx.jpg
As far as the headline goes, not running any of this as root is a good start.
I don't really see why it's wrong that Nate has political opinions. The alternative is Jim Lehrer who values his "objectivity" so much that he doesn't even vote at elections.

Sometimes, facts favour liberals, sometimes they don't.
Should I find it ironic that it's down?
Yes, you defined the problem in the opening sentence of your second paragraph. But I disagree that you should not have to maintain a whitelist. What are your email contacts i.e. what is your email address book? You already maintain a list of people you correspond with, whether you think of it that way or not. And when you want to correspond with someone new, you have to give them your email address. As it stands, there is no _reliable_ way for them to look it up. There is no worldwide directory of email addresses. In fact, what do we do? We try to hide lists of email addresses.

If everyone had a fixed address with a mail server running, "lookup" i.e. simple MX lookup, might be possible, e.g. if your IP address is 1.2.3.4, anyone could send mail to inquiries@[1.2.3.4] or something like that. But I'm not sure that alone really solves the problem.

Email still works without a worldwide directory. People exchange email addresses and they keep lists of them known as address books.
Sure, but I'm having a hard time imagining the answer to either question has changed. If it had, I'm sure he's capable of having that information removed from a post bearing his name.
I am not pointing out current capabilities, I am just hypothesizing on what is likely to develop in drone war when more than one side has drones.
It feels likely that the fundamental problem facing JS programs competing with the entire solution space available to C programs --- apart from the nerd who will implement an equivalently fast JIT compiler to run the JS on just to make a point --- is that C code has much better control over the layout of data in memory. You can work around the GC issues and modern compilers work around the interpretation overhead, but a C program is going to tend to have the easiest time ensuring that its working set fits into cache.

Of course, the real problem here is that he's comparing his JS code to a random blob of C code that just happens to be part of the MySQL package. Is the MySQL client library famously performant?
I just read through that entire EVE post and WOW was it long. It was a really good read, even if somewhat repetitive, and just wanted to say thanks for linking to it!
WHAT KIND OF INSANITY?
Not as far as I know. We haven't seen flash for iOS yet which would seem to suggest it's still in effect.
This article involves issues that directly involve silicon valley and other internet startup centers. Why would it not be appropriate for this site?
Um every fast and decent JS engine IS WRITTEN IN C!!!

I refuse to click on anything as ridiculous sounding as "Faster than C? Parsing binary data in JavaScript".

JavaScript will NEVER be faster than C. If you personally test it and it is - all that you have really proven is that the C compiler you are using was horribly written and is probably 20+ years old. The level of ignorance that programmers have about low level languages and the performance cost of abstractions amazes me sometimes.
If you are happy to ship to New Zealand I am keen (Nexus 7 is expensive here). I already bought one second hand for my brother but I want one for myself (now I found out I love Nexus 7 more than an iPad!) c d r c a t A T g m a i l . c o m

PS: This thread already removed from HN, so hopefully it is OK that I am adding irrelevant comment noise?
In the case of the ThinkPad bundled software stuff it's also that they seem to look unchanged since the Windows 95 era or so. Nothing terribly wrong with carrying on with a brand and look, but to me the Windows built-in controls for Wifi, etc. are far more usable than the strange bundled software (which may have had its place up until Windows XP got native Wifi support, I guess).
Making random accusations of corruption is neither helpful nor does it appear to have much basis in truth.

1) Google does make political donations, but they are quite small (~$5000 per candidate) and primarily towards candidates who - to generalize greatly - are "pro internet" (eg anti-SOPA etc)[1][2][3]. One could argue that these people also generally have a "hands off the internet" approach to internet policy which is favourable to Google. One could also argue that a a "hands off the internet" approach to internet policy is sensible..

2) Based on your comment If giving a browser away is anti-competitive I wonder what giving an entire operating system + browser away for free is it would appear you don't understand what anti-competitive behaviour is or what happened in the MS case. A company can give away anything they like - it only causes legal problems if they have market dominance in that market and they use that dominance to exclude other competitors. Microsoft didn't get in trouble just for making IE free - they got in trouble for stopping PC manufactures installing Netscape on new PCs if they installed Windows and for manipulating the Windows APIs to favour IE over Netscape.[4]

[1] http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/244593-g...

[2] http://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency.html

[3] http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft
Must be because "reality has a liberal bias".
If it truly is science vs. religion, then the Republican party will die and be reborn as something new. Religion loses to science over the course of history.
Lots of people who supported Obama in 2008 no longer do. Meanwhile, why are you so sure he'd update a FAQ entry on a site he no longer maintains?
Digital 100, most valuable boot strapped company
Jobs may have built the best designed computers but if it was only up to Steve and his way, the world would not have adopted the desktop computers as they did with IBM clones.

It was 286/486's with Windows95 which made common people adopt desktop computers and plethora of commonly available software which were easily installable.
Simplify the problem you've got or rather don't complexify it. I've done it myself, it's fun to do. You have a boring problem and hiding behind it is a much more interesting problem. So you code the more interesting problem and the one you've got is a subset of it and it falls out trivial. But of course you wrote ten times as much code as you needed to solve the problem that you actually had.

It seems that many programmers believe that writing 10x the amount of code to solve a "simple" problem in a complex, yet "general" way is somehow a win.

I wonder if that has to do with having a better grasp of the "complex" problem, so you develop a belief that you "understand" the problem, and can therefore "solve" it?

We know from study after study that 10x the code generally means 10x the bugs -- that bugs scale linearly with text on the page.

And yet we still don't want to solve the problem at hand in the simplest possible way. We don't want to specialize our code. We don't want to write 1/10 the code that just does the present job, and does it well.

I'm as guilty as the next programmer, but I wish I understood the impulse better...
How Steve Jobs' Love of Simplicity Fueled A Design Revolution
IMO, using light colored type on a dark background is relieves more eyestrain than any particular font could.
IIRC, you got something like a 10%-20% speedup on the C64 by turning off the video. Wonder if this setup has support for that?
They'd have to be. You can't have your cell phone out when you are sitting at the table, so Glass wont be any better
>A good example would be an electricity provider that owns the only power transmission lines in a given area

The only legal implementation of the win32 api. The only legal implementation of FAT. The only legal implementation of doc'95. The only legal implementation of directx. Example after example, not of innovation (comparable solutions exist) but of intentionl incompatibility. The intent was demonstrated, not just in encrypted file formats but actual email correspondence where the intent was made explicit.

Yes. Legal action, pressure and illegal (from a ToS perspective) reverse-engineering allowed some people to overcome parts of their prison. This was not the result of the free market, but a political and social campaign. And although it liberated some, these people paid a hefty price of digital exclusion, and this war took almost a decade, which many players only survived because they chose to pay Microsoft "protection" money. From Novell, to TomTom.

Your coloring of events, is far removed from reality. Just ask any linux desktop user foot soldier in the 90ties. There were times they were updating MSN protocols as often as possible, just to make sure people using linux would be socially isolated, with their "illegal" clients..

The biggest shame, is that with all this focus on the oppression in the last decade, we fail to discuss, the even bigger risks in our new cloud based world, and the consolification of computing devices. Things are going to get even worse, without regulation... Microsoft was a kind dictator compared to how Apple or Amazon tend to operate.

And just because politicians may be corrupt, that does not mean, that there is a solution to all of this that does not require the right types of regulations. Like data liberation. If we need to fix politics before we can fix this we better get started.
I disagree with this: one of the main functions of Apple's stores has been to shift product servicing and support from telephone / third-party resellers to direct contact. I needed a screen replaced on a 15" MBP a few months ago, which without an Apple Store near me would have required my laptop to be out of commission for a week. At the Apple Store, the repair happened while I waited.

I would argue many people have been converted to Macs because of the support available at the stores. Regardless of this, many Apple Stores are highly profitable - the Regents Street store in London, for example, has the highest sales per square foot of any store in the city[1].

[1]: http://www.macworld.co.uk/mac/news/?newsid=27038
Humans who are not biased probably do not exist. Or at least do not care or know about politics in the slightest. I think there is nothing wrong with that. That doesn't invalidate his work.

I know too much about human biases to even try to claim that his do not influence his interpretations and work at all – I just don't think that's possible – but that is general and in all likelihood inevitable problem. I think it's pretty clear, however, that it's in his best interest to make accurate predictions, not partisan predictions.

I do not think it's really helpful to start out with that question. It puts too much focus on what's actually important. Yeah, bias can be hard to detect, but a little bias does not make models useless and when there is a lot of bias you should actually be able to point at what's wrong with the model instead of having to resort to some diffuse claims of bias.

Writing this made me think of Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_Noelle-Neumann). I disagree with many of her views and I think it would be fair to call her biased after reading her most famous work (The Spiral of Silence), but I do respect her work. There is a difference.
This is a very silly point of view. What you think you're arguing is that Javascript can't conceivably be faster than native code, and you're conflating C with native code. But C isn't machine code either; like Javascript, it's transformed into machine code by a compiler.

I don't generally think that Javascript runtimes are going to routinely beat C compilers for most performant execution of basic programs any time soon, but I'd happily bet that some high level language JIT is going to give C a real run for its money sometime soon. That JIT will inevitably be expressible in C, but when your recourse as a C programmer is "implement the important parts of the JIT for language X, then proceed to solve your real problem", you're not making much of a case for C.
The key point. SW online does not have the charachteristics of natural monopoly. I have 8x choices in my integrated search bar (the default ones on Firefox). There are some network effects, or returns to scale from usage analytics that impact quality, but that is a different animal. MS Dos / Intel x86 technical architecture was actually exclusive.

Also, with MSFT was clearly a case of prediatory pricing funded by cross-subsidy from the monoply business. They set out to 'kill' netscape in its infacy as a business stratgy. Google is arguably just doing its job, and doing it better. Advertisers fell like there is "no choice" (because of scale), but they are sock-puppets. The consumer is the searcher. Advertisers have plenty of other places to advertsise online, so there is no monopoly.
You would if you were Alanis Morissette. Otherwise, no.
Yeah, well please tell me how? The JavaScript engine is written in C so how could the language running on top of it be faster?

I will tell you how it can be - if the JavaScript engine JITs the JS in a more optimized way than the C compiler compiled the C.

Well how does that make JS faster than C when JS will always carry more overhead? It cannot and does not - all it means is that the compiler was far better.

A poor C compiler may be outperformed by the best JS one, but that is about the only scenario where JS will outperform C.
ZappaJS is Alive
Why We’ll Never Stop Talking About Steve Jobs
I'm a nerd through and through and I find this conversation boring every time it comes up.
His name is right there on the FAQ. He's a media figure, of at least some note, who makes his living predicting political outcomes. If he had changed his stand, he would have the information removed from something bearing his name. It has direct impact on perception about his work.

He'd have it changed.
I don't take offense to the words that were used. It's more akin to articles that use absurd fonts or blatantly poor color schemes. Such things are unnecessary, and make it more awkward to absorb the actual content.

When I see authors doing things that obviously make their work harder to read, it does make me question their judgment, which in turn makes me question the validity of what is being expressed.
Why would he sharpen the small images? The browser won't.
And even with our super-long life spans, those old PCs will still work 100 years from now long after all the MBPs and iPhones are completely dead. I remember my old IBM XT, it could probably derail a train and still boot up.
> It's a fairly settled issue in social science, though, that abstinence-only sex ed doesn't work.

So? The alternative to abstinence-only sex ed isn't perfection, it's a bunch of stuff that doesn't work all that well either.

Your links are all behind paywalls. That said, they're probably just like the other work on the subject. Their "measure of success" is curious at best. (No, reducing teen pregnancy isn't the only goal.)

As to "telling teaching inaccuracies", no other teaching is held to that standard, so why is abstinence-only sex ed held to that standard?

Note - I think that abstinence-only sex ed is a bad idea. My point is that the arguments are not "scientific" or fair. That said, they are doing a great job in discrediting science. If that's your goal....
Apart from Racket, Chicken Scheme is the most active Scheme and it has a lot of libraries (eggs as they call it) from OS interface to amazon web services and web frameworks.
I probably should just upvote you but I chuckled aloud.
"Faster than C" seems to imply that the author is not seeing the true value of C. It is more than just speed.

You can only build so much with Javascript.

With C, the possibilities are limitless.

For a specific task like parsing, use whatever language you want. But please do not believe that by knowing Javascript you can both dismiss C as an optimal language and that you can build anything. You can't, as to either. As it stands, by relying on Javsacsript you're restricted to a browser or Node.js and whoever controls the browser and Node.js effectively has final control over your opportunitities. What's the browser written in? Javascript? What is Node.js written in?

Who cares if your parser is faster than C? If it's "fast enough", that's all that matters. Users of big, complex, graphical browsers or mySQL databases are well accustomed to slow speeds. They have learned how to wait.
Is Britain experiencing a golden age of engineering?
Thanks a lot. It suddenly seems so clear.

But I wish you hadn't responded! I suddenly want to be 14 again so bad it's hard to get back to work on the app I'm building ;-(

EVE will be around for a few years, I hope. And by then I should be able to play it.
Smart applications without machine learning algorithms
Disagree; you can't even get to www.fivethirtyeight.com anymore (it redirects to NYT) and Silver is pretty transparent; I think if that affiliation was dependable information, it'd be somewhere in the masthead of his blog.

It's not important either way.

(For what it's worth: I still support Obama).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony

Dramatic Irony seems to fit.

> Dramatic irony is a disparity of awareness between actor and observer: when words and actions possess significance that the listener or audience understands, but the speaker or character does not, for example when a character says to another "I'll see you tomorrow!" when the audience (but not the character) knows that the character will die before morning.

"I set up a web server!" when the audience (but not the character) knows that the web server will die before morning.
This argument is tired, but I'll rebut it anyway. Yes, every performant JS engine is written in C, but that doesn't matter, even a little bit. When the code is compiled to machine code (as in V8) you're on a level playing field; all that matters is speed of compilation and how well the compiler performs.

If I write a C compiler in Python with the same optimizations as GCC, is the output any different? No.

So the argument has to be: there is something fundamental in JS that prevents it from being compiled to code as fast as C. That argument holds up for whole programs -- there are places where you just can't optimize JS greatly -- but if you're talking about specific bits of code, there's no reason it can't match (or surpass) C.

At the end of the day, JS can be quite fast, and the arguments against it don't hold up to scrutiny.
Magic marker unlocks hotel lock
You can be too kind. Grinfucking people is doing them a disservice.
>No one is going to hear you, until they know they have been heard

This is the key part I think. Everything else is just a matter of strategy or personality, and being blunt or socially awkward is less an issue than not to see the things from the perspective of the people who built it.

Edit: removed random bits
With that in mind, I tend to think that the only items that come closest to having intrinsic value are food and potable water.
I found it amusing that, when in college, the only people who objected to the on-campus bar's pool table usage scheme - "winner stays, loser pays" - in the whole four years I was there, were French :)
Scalable CSS-based Playing Cards
Good catch, meant ^z
Or in other words: computers became less memorable once they became a commodity.

I remember my first computer (a Z80 based VZ-200) and was intimately familiar with its machine code. Since then, my computers have just been boxes for executing the x86 instruction set.
Why are there so many breakaway online courses why cant all of them just choose one format and platform. Coursera has a number of Stanford courses they could have chosen it.
Interface Sketch: free templates for web, mobile and tablet
I wish that were true. Once religion, especially fundamentalist religion, gets control, science is in real trouble.

Read Heinlein's "Revolt in 2100".
Because then they will look sharper. You have to sharpen when you downsample images. Web design 101.